Svínafellsjökull

Where it sits. Öræfajökull is the ice-covered stratovolcano that forms the southern extremity of Vatnajökull, rising straight out of the coastal plain of south-east Iceland between Skaftafell and the fishing town of Höfn. It is about twenty kilometres across, its summit caldera measures roughly three by four kilometres and is filled with ice, and on the caldera's north-western rim stands Hvannadalshnúkur at 2,110 metres — the highest point in the country. From the Ring Road the mountain does not read as a volcano at all; it reads as a white dome with a ragged skirt of ice tongues, because the entire edifice is buried under the southern lobe of the Vatnajökull ice cap. Everything on this stretch of coast, including the farms, the airstrip at Fagurhólsmýri and the church at Hof, sits on ground the mountain built.

The story behind the name. The district here was once called Litla-Hérað, a settled farming region, and the volcano was known to the Norse settlers as Knappafellsjökull. That ended in 1362, when Öræfajökull produced the largest explosive eruption in Iceland since settlement. Rhyolitic ash fell across the region, meltwater burst from beneath the ice as catastrophic glacial floods, and the farms below were annihilated. The survivors renamed the place Öræfi — wasteland — and the mountain took its present name from the ruin it had caused. A second, smaller eruption followed in 1727 and 1728, again with floods pouring down the outlet glaciers. Both events are archived in the region's soil as pale tephra layers, and both explain why the coastal plain is a wilderness of black sand rather than pasture.

The outlet glaciers. Öræfajökull's ice drains outward through a ring of named tongues, and these, rather than the summit, are what most visitors actually meet. Working clockwise from the north they include Breiðamerkurjökull, which calves into the Jökulsárlón lagoon; Fjallsjökull, above Fjallsárlón; Kvíárjökull with its immense flanking moraines; Falljökull and Virkisjökull, the pair used for most guided ice walks in the district; Svínafellsjökull, the striped tongue familiar from a decade of film work; and Skaftafellsjökull, reached by an easy path from the national park's visitor centre. Each has retreated markedly since the 1890s, and the sequence of moraine ridges left behind them is one of the clearest records of twentieth-century glacier loss anywhere in Europe.

On screen, at one remove. The Öræfi district has hosted more science-fiction production than any other stretch of Icelandic coast, but almost all of it happened on the mountain's outlets rather than on the mountain itself: Batman Begins, Interstellar and Game of Thrones on Svínafellsjökull, Bond and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider material at Jökulsárlón and Breiðamerkurjökull. What Öræfajökull supplies in those films is the backdrop — the enormous white wall that sits behind the ice fronts and makes a valley glacier read as a whole alien world. If you have watched Mann's planet or the frozen chase sequences of the Bond films, you have already looked at this volcano without being told its name.

Climbing it. The standard ascent of Hvannadalshnúkur starts at Sandfell, a farm ruin beside the Ring Road west of Hof, and climbs some 1,800 vertical metres to the caldera rim before crossing the summit ice field. It is a long day — commonly twelve to fifteen hours round trip — over glaciated terrain with real crevasse hazard, and it is properly done roped, in a party, with a guide who knows the current state of the snow bridges. The season runs roughly from March to early June, when spring snow still fills the crevasses and daylight is already generous. Later in the summer the route becomes bare, broken ice and most operators stop running it. Weather turns the mountain around more often than fitness does; the summit plateau is exposed to Atlantic systems with nothing between it and the sea.

Getting there and timing. The Ring Road skirts the mountain's southern foot for about fifty kilometres, and the best free viewpoints are simply the lay-bys between Skaftafell and Fagurhólsmýri, plus the turf-roofed church at Hof and the seabird headland of Ingólfshöfði out on the sands. Skaftafell, with the national park's main visitor centre, campsite and trail network, is the natural base; Höfn lies about eighty kilometres east. Öræfajökull is an active volcano and is monitored as one: a period of unrest beginning in 2017, with elevated seismicity and a deepening ice cauldron in the summit caldera, put the mountain on a raised aviation alert for a time before activity subsided again. Nothing about that should deter a visit, but it is worth understanding that the white dome above the farms is a sleeping system, not scenery.